Take a drive down England’s M40 motorway and chances are you’ll see a large bird with a forked tail overhead searching for roadkill: the red kite.
The conservation status of this species has looked promising in recent years. Assessments made between 2005 and 2019 classified red kites as “near threatened” on the IUCN Red List, a global system for classifying each species’ extinction risk. Population growth throughout large swathes of the red kite’s range meant that the species was bumped up to “least concern” in 2020.
